Architects and Artisans

Out of a recently excavated cemetery on the Russian/Chinese border, dating from the third century and preserved by permafrost, a number of stunning hand-crafted artifacts now shed new light on the meaning of a nomadic lifestyle. “They change the common view about nomads,” says Soren Starke, Assistant Professor of Central Asian Art and Archaeology at [...]

Back in 1995, Hirosuke Kitamura came to a fork in the road of his professional career. “I wanted to learn either hair design or photography,” the Japanese/Brazilian artist says.  “I wanted to do something special, something high-tech.” He chose photography – in Brazil.   And on Feb. 1, his work will be on display at 1500 Gallery [...]

Filmmaker Laura Israel isn’t tilting at windmills – but she does want to cast a critical eye in their direction. And she’s done that with “Windfall” – her first documentary film, art directed within an inch of its life – and one that delivers a profound message: Look before you leap into wind power. “People who are [...]

Truly one of the giants in post-World War II experimental photography, Jerry Uelsmann perfected the art of combining negatives in the darkroom to create new compositions. “He took a different tack – that the negative didn’t have to be the departure point,” says Phillip Prodger, exhibition curator and PEM’s curator of photography.  He’s currently pulling together [...]

Jim Berger was 12 years old in 1956 when he put pencil to paper, wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright and asked a favor. He had a paper route, he said, and hoped that the architect might design for Eddie, his black Lab, a house “which would be easy to build and would go with our house.”  His father had commissioned Wright [...]

Sometimes, adversity stimulates a sharper focus. That’s certainly the case with the new 57,000 square foot campus center at Molloy College on Long Island, designed by BRB Architects. They started out designing a 75,000 square foot building in 2005, only to get tangled up first in environmental reviews, and then in the market crash of late [...]

If clothing was indeed the first architecture, then a spring fundraiser for the Architecture + Design Museum (A+D) on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles promises to celebrate its 21st-century evolution. From 7:00 to 11:00 PM on Saturday, March 10, a salon-style runway event at A+D will feature wearable artworks provided by top talent from the realms [...]

From the 1920s until the mid-’60s, the nearly indestructible Speed Graphic was the camera of choice for photojournalists around the world. Now, photographer M. J. Sharp has found a new application for the long-retired camera once produced en masse by Graphlex in Rochester, N.Y. She makes C-prints from night-time exposures that range from four minutes [...]

Matt Clayton started working with black and white film and prints up in the attic when he was a child, but it wasn’t until he finished school at the London School of Communication that he really got started photographing architecture. For about seven years now, he’s been shooting with an Arca 6 x 9 and [...]

After stints in advertising and running a gourmet ice cream business in Miami Beach, Julie Davidow sold out to her partner, travelled for a year, came back and, at 32, studied art at the New World School of Art. “I’ve been happy ever since,” the minimalist painter says. It shows. Her work is a textured [...]